Clinton, Huckabee, and Me
Reality Check (April 8, 2011)
This is a report on screeners: how they can cost you or your employer dearly. It is also about incentives.
A few months ago, I got to thinking about two former governors of Arkansas, where I used to live: Bill Clinton and Mike Huckabee. They have something in common. They both lost a lot of weight, and they both have kept it off. Almost no overweight person can do both. By "almost no," I mean about 5%. But those two did . . . so far.
How did they do it?
If there was a common approach, are there people who could benefit from this information? Yes. How many? About 5% of those who decide to try it.
When you have a tested solution for a universal problem, and people are desperate to solve that problem, you have a business opportunity. Or, if you prefer, you have a ministry opportunity.
Bill Clinton and Mike Huckabee have a story to tell. It is the same story, with variations. Here is the story: "We did what 95% of people who want to do have not yet been able to do."
To do this requires two things: motivation and self-discipline. The failure of 95% of people who start diets to gain long-term positive results has to do with the failure of long-term motivation to overcome a short-term lack of self-discipline. In short, the price is too high . . . after the project begins.
A BRIGHT IDEA
This got me to thinking. What if Clinton and Huckabee got together to chat about a joint venture? The joint venture would involve these things:
1. Telling their story.
2. Getting their story to desperate people.
3. Getting paid for their story.
4. Deciding what to do with the money.
5. Getting the money where it belongs.
Telling their story is easy. A book would do it. I came up with a title: "The Arkansas Governors' Diet." It's a gimmick, of course. It points to a common link between them. Maybe they could use the "Clinton-Huckabee Diet." But Mrs. Clinton might have misgivings. "Couldn't you be more specific? It's not my problem. ARE YOU IMPLYING THAT IT'S MY PROBLEM?"
Here are two ex-plump guys from rival political parties. They were not obese, but they were not candidates for "GQ." They were the more along the lines of photo-ops for "Super-Size Me." They were both on board the Cardiac Express. They were not alone.
They need more than a book to tell the story. They need a Website. This site should be the product of medical opinions from experts in weight loss techniques and health. It should make available articles on the latest findings, but in laymen's terminology, written by certified experts. It should also have discussion forums for dieters to interact with each other.
It should be a subscription-based site: access to forums. (This keeps out the crazies.)
It should offer the latest health findings for free.
What would be the motivation for experts to participate? Lots of reasons. Being part of a national organization is good. Name identification is good. Do you think physicians might increase their practices if they were part of this team?
What to do with the money? Feed hungry children. Clinton's foundation is already set up to do things like this. Send the money to the organizations that distribute Plumpy'nut. What is Plumpy'nut? Read this:
Adopt this slogan for the site: "Lose Weight and Feed Hungry Children."
But I have a problem. I don't know either of these governors. They are both famous. They are both surrounded by screeners.
Anyone who can do big things is surrounded by screeners. Therein lies the problem, both for someone with a good idea and the person who can implement it.
SCREENERS
There is a limited amount of time. Hardly anyone has more than about 90 years to accomplish much. The more influence a person has, the more that others with their One Big Idea want to get the influential person to listen to his sales pitch.
So, people with influence hire screeners. In fact, every subordinate is a screener. Screeners are also implementers. They control the flow of information upward. They implement policies downward.
The basic rule for a front-line screener is twofold: "Toss out the junk, but send the good ideas up the chain of command." It's both positive and negative.
Some people are better at tossing out than sending up. Others are the reverse.
This presents a problem for the leader. How can he reward people who are better at one skill than another?
It is easy to reward the person who sends a good idea up the chain of command. But this leads to a problem. The toss-out people start sending up junk, hoping for a winner and a reward. The system clogs up.
So, the word comes down: "Toss out more stuff." They go to work. They are good at their work.
How can the person on top impose negative sanctions on the overly efficient toss-out person? He never hears about what was tossed out.
Or does he? There is in life a phenomenon known as the six degrees of separation. More popularly, it is known as the Kevin Bacon game. Everyone is six steps from another person. The trick is to implement a program that takes your information through the six degrees of separation. This is how you do an end run around the influential person's formal screening system. If this end-run is not successful, then the person on top is at the mercy of the toss-out specialists.
In a free market, profit-seeking organizations learn how to balance the two tasks. The twin sanctions of profit and loss guide the decision-makers. If they don't, they lose money. The problem comes with civil government and non-profit organizations. There is no comparable sanctions system in either institutional arrangement.
CLINTON'S SCREENER
I wrote a short article on my idea regarding the Arkansas governors' diet. I posted it on my site. Then I sent a brief note -- one line -- to each of the men's organizations. I included a link to my article.
I wrote the article so that it could get through a screener. It was short. It got right to the point: a way to raise a lot of money for charity. The paragraphs were short.
Basically, the article was an ad. I have written many direct-response ads over the last 35 years. I am good at it. But getting through a salaried screener is not easy. The screener is trained to think: "Toss." That is what he does best.
There are no visible negative sanctions in this life for tossing out junk mail. The negative sanctions are the gains that never came. They are imaginary. Specialists in tossing out unsolicited mail have weak imaginations. That is why they get a job like tossing out junk mail. The response I got from Clinton's screener was typical. He sent an unsigned form letter. No one can trace who sent it. He took no risks. What did the letter say? It said that Clinton's foundation does not give money to any group that is not connected with the foundation.
But my letter did not solicit funds. On the contrary, it presented a program for raising funds.
No matter. The screener did not understand the difference. A letter that mentions money must be asking for money. Out goes the unsigned canned email.
Within an hour I had in my inbox a fundraising letter from Clinton's foundation. I had unclicked the box on the "Contact Us" page that asked to be placed on the mailing list. No matter. (Actually, the project sounds pretty good, but if I donate once, will I ever get off the list?)
I have not heard from Huckabee's screener.
You can read my letter and the response from Clinton's screener here:
My favorite story of screeners is the story of the 1982 movie "E.T." Spielberg wanted a scene where a boy lures a little space creature out of its hiding place. He thought the lure should be a trail of pieces of candy. For the story of who won and who lost in the extraterrestrial candy wars, click here:
THE GREATEST SCREENER IN HISTORY
We may never know who the greatest toss-out screener was. A really good toss-out screener never gets caught. We can only judge among those toss-out screeners who get caught. There is no question who the greatest one was: Stanislov Petrov. No one else comes close . . . fortunately.
You say you've never heard of him. This indicates the power of government. There are some stories that governments do not want to get out.
Because of Wikipedia, the story is there to get out. I like to get it out every so often.
Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov (born c. 1939) is a retired lieutenant colonel of the Soviet Air Defence Forces who deviated from standard Soviet protocol by correctly identifying a missile attack warning as a false alarm on September 26, 1983. This decision may have prevented an erroneous retaliatory nuclear attack on the United States and its Western allies. Investigation of the satellite warning system later confirmed that the system had malfunctioned. There are varying reports whether Petrov actually reported the alert to his superiors and questions over the part his decision played in preventing nuclear war, because, according to the Permanent Mission of the Russian Federation, nuclear retaliation is based on multiple sources that confirm an actual attack. The incident, however, exposed a flaw in the Soviet early warning system. Petrov asserts that he was neither rewarded nor punished for his actions.
The article describes what happened. The USSR relied on satellite systems to warn the military of a missile attack by the United States. The computer system sounded an alert. The attack had begun.
Think of this as the most important piece of junk mail in history.
Shortly after midnight, the bunker's computers reported that an intercontinental ballistic missile was heading toward the Soviet Union from the U.S. Petrov considered the detection a computer error, since a United States first- strike nuclear attack would be likely to involve hundreds of simultaneous missile launches in order to disable any Soviet means for a counterattack. Furthermore, the satellite system's reliability had been questioned in the past.
It is the task of screeners to assess the accuracy of junk mail, and then decide: send it up or toss it out.
Petrov dismissed the warning as a false alarm, though accounts of the event differ as to whether he notified his superiors or not after he concluded that the computer detections were false and that no missile had been launched. Later, the computers identified four additional missiles in the air, all directed towards the Soviet Union. Petrov again suspected that the computer system was malfunctioning, despite having no other source of information to confirm his suspicions. The Soviet Union's land radar was incapable of detecting missiles beyond the horizon, and waiting for it to positively identify the threat would limit the Soviet Union's response time to minutes.
He decided to toss it all out. You and I are alive because he made the correct decision.
While he was investigated for not acting as ordered, no charges were brought against him. It would have been bad publicity. "Soviet Air Force officer sacked for not starting World War III." Neither side wanted any publicity on this.
Given the fact that the movie "War Games" had been released in June, and was still being released in Europe, no one in government wanted any publicity. "War Games" is about a screener who refuses to launch an attack on the USSR when informed to do so. The Pentagon then installs a computerized system that will not disobey orders. Matthew Broderick, a teenage computer hacker, stumbles into the Defense Department's computerized screener and begins a war game that the computer thinks is real. World War III looms.
Had Petrov not acted as he did, the movie would have done poorly in Europe. So would everything else.
CONCLUSION
The world needs screeners. But organizations make a mistake. First-line screeners should be paid more than other first-line employees, such as shipping clerks and mail clerks. They should be paid more, because organizations need people with superior judgment in this position.
The screeners should be trained to spot what is good. This takes good judgment. Tossing out bad stuff is easy. Most stuff is bad. The key skill is to identify ideas with promise. These should be sent up the chain of command. The second-line screener should decide which of the multiple chains the letter should be sent to next.
There should also be a follow-up system. The second-line screener should make sure that it was received, within a week.
There must be sanctions in this world. The most efficient system of sanctions known to man are heaven and hell, and profit and loss.
With modern civil government, it's more hell than heaven, more loss than profit. For business, it's the reverse, at least for those businesses that survive.
The tough call is the non-profit organization, because no one owns it. There is no clear-cut system of sanctions that seems to apply predictably, with one exception: the email fundraising letter. They seem to be eternal. If you know how to write them, you will never go hungry. No Plumpy'nut for you!